General George Patton is reputed to have once said, “Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.” General Patton's attitudes about risk had far-reaching implications indeed, in that the decisions he made and the risks he took sometimes cost the lives of men in battle. But the notion of calculated risk goes well beyond warfare; it is a process that we all engage in as we make the daily decisions that define our lives. And the fact remains that most of the risks—economic and otherwise—that individuals face in their lives are not shared by society. As inefficient and insecure as it may seem, “we allow our standards of living to be determined substantially by a game of chance.”
Over the years a number of instruments have emerged that enable people to “hedge their bets” in the face of risk. Insurance, in its many forms, is the classic example of a hedge instrument. So too, is the futures market for hedging the price of commodities. In fact, a futures market can exist for anything, functioning as a market where bets can be placed on the course of the price or index that defines that market. Hedging in any market—whether it be commodities, real estate, or anything with any kind of economic consequences—is essentially the same as buying insurance against price changes.
A number of financial management systems have been proposed in the past. Exemplary systems include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,232,367, 4,633,397, 4,742,457, 4,752,877, 4,766,539, 4,839,804, 4,876,648, 5,083,270, 5,101,353, 5,136,501 and 5,206,803. Broadly speaking, the prior art has proposed several methods to transfer the types of risks, which are common to many people. These include banks, insurers, equities and commodities exchanges, the bond and swap markets, and mutual funds, each of which developed from a recognition that numerous parties with similar risk exposures needed effective methods of transfer and a means of determining the value of risk transfer at any given time.
These structures operate on the basis of transferring risk to an entity which utilizes one of two primary forms of capital structure: a capital leveraging system (banks and insurance companies) or a capital matching system (the exchanges and markets).
Under the capital leveraging system, an insurer may accept any type or amount of risk, subject to internal underwriting guidelines and regulatory restrictions. This format provides a significant degree of flexibility in the pricing, terms, and limits of risks accepted. These insurers operate on the premise that premiums cover claims. Their capital is available to pay claims if losses exceed premiums and investment income. The aggregate of policy liabilities though, is generally much larger than their combined premium and capital. So, like a bank, which could not pay if all depositors asked for their money, insurance companies are not generally designed to pay if all policies claimed their limits.
Leveraging capital, i.e., a small amount of capital compared to the risk exposures assumed, translates a small underwriting profit on premium into a substantial return on capital. Conversely, a relatively small loss over premium results in a significant loss to capital. This system does not absolutely assure an insurer's ability to pay in that an insurer's policy limits are generally much larger than its assets. Hence, an insurer must only accept risks common to many people, limiting its exposure to each single risk to a small percentage of its capital, and relying on geographic and risk type diversification, as well as reinsurance, to protect its shareholder's capital. This works well when losses are predictable. It is when insurers accept unique or difficult-to-place risks that premium as well as capital may not be sufficient to cover claims. Even Lloyd's of London (which operates in a manner similar to a collection of small insurance companies with the exception that should losses exceed available funds, its underwriting members, similar to shareholders, can be forced, in theory, to pay up to the limit of their assets) has experienced such difficulties.
Under the prior art, insurance policies have provided security to insureds based on and no greater than the general claims paying ability rating (the ability to pay claims) of an insurer to perform its obligations. Although reinsurance has sometimes been available, reinsurance policies likewise protect the insurer only to the extent of the reinsurance company's capacity to pay loss claims as they accrue.
In contrast, a capital matching system such as an exchange, accepts risk by matching buyers and sellers, i.e., parties transfer risk to those accepting it, in effect matching risk to capital. Under this system parties transfer or accept risks which are easily quantified in comparatively small units, such as through futures and options contracts. It limits the types and conditions under which parties may transfer to specifically defined contractual units, priced by the marketplace, being a price agreed between those parties wishing to transfer risk and those willing to accept it.
These narrowly defined contracts offer little flexibility in the risk being accepted. Although each investor can select the type and amount of risk accepted, parties transferring risks are not concerned with the performance of a specific party having accepted a corresponding amount of risk. The exchange stands as the intermediary between all parties, perfectly matched, with its only exposure being the credit performance of any one participant. Like Lloyd's, these parties' assets can be attached to secure their performance.
Each system operates on the basis of accepting risks which are common to large numbers of people. As financial transactions and our world in general grow more complex, certain types of risk exposures have become increasingly difficult to transfer in today's markets. In the insurance markets, catastrophic events and judicial reinterpretation have caused a contraction in some types of insurance capacity. It appears that today's insurance markets are frequently unable or unwilling to facilitate the transfer of unique risks such as those with a high possibility of loss, where the loss could come earlier rather than later or with more severity than projected. The exchanges have taken some steps toward addressing unique risks, such as catastrophe futures contracts, but again the terms are restrictive and do not easily integrate with the flexibility of a reinsurance contract. In essence, neither the exchanges nor mutual funds can accept a single unique risk.
In spite of insurance companies and exchanges, the fact remains that there are no existing instruments that people can use to hedge most of the common, everyday risks they face. For example, workers have no direct way to hedge against the pain of prolonged work stoppage. Retailers have no way to hedge against macroeconomic surprises in the global economy which could impact the availability of inventory items. And individuals have no way to hedge against government decisions—such as war, economic embargoes, legislation and a myriad of other possibilities—that could substantially impact their livelihoods.
One limited attempt to address the above shortcomings has been presented by the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which are operated by faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business as part of a research and teaching mission. The IEM are real-money futures markets in which contract payoffs depend on economic and political events such as elections. More specifically, the IEM is a real-money, small-scale futures exchange in which the ultimate values of the contracts traded are determined by political events, financial events and economic indicators or other real-world events such as companies' earnings per share (EPS) or stock price returns. Participants in these markets invest their own funds, buy and sell listed contracts, and bear the risk of losing money as well as earning profits.
The exclusive purposes of the IEM are teaching and research. Through the IEM as a teaching device, participants learn first-hand about the operation of a financial market. Because they have an added incentive to do so, they often become better informed about events determining the ultimate value of the contract being traded—be that a political race, the earnings per share of a company, the stock return of a company, or the exchange rate between a foreign currency and the dollar. Through the IEM as a research venture, the markets provide insights into market and trader behavior. Participation in the IEM is open to students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities worldwide; IEM political markets are also open to non-academic participants.
The IEM is operated as a not-for-profit venture. No commissions or transactions fees are charged, and the method of issuing contracts and making final payoffs on these contracts ensures that the IEM does not realize financial profits or suffer losses from market transactions. Although the IEM is under the regulatory purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), it is not regulated by, nor are its operator registered with, the CFTC or any other regulatory authority.
As noted above, the market operates on computer systems at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business of the University of Iowa; traders gain access through the World Wide Web. At the time of this writing, the home page for the IEM is maintained by the University of Iowa.
While the IEM goes somewhat beyond traditional commodity futures in the types of contracts which are offered, much of the system is modeled on conventional futures trading principles. Accordingly, IEM, like other traditional risk hedging methods such as insurance, offers a limited variety of contracts and provides incomplete markets and thus restricts opportunities for risk management.
Thus, presently available risk hedging methods, including IEM, fail to address potential needs of parties including such problem as:                Inadequate contract diversity to address the vast range of uncertainties for which risk hedging is potentially advantageous;        Excessive transaction costs rendering small markets of limited traders impractical;        Liquidity restrictions to trading viability in brick and mortar futures markets;        Inadequate real time communications capabilities necessary for market trading when traders are geographically dispersed;        Problems due to the absence of liquid secondary markets in tickets, coupons, hotel and airline reservations, and advance purchase orders; and        Problems in inventory management        
Thus, there continues to be a long felt need for a system and a platform which brings buyers and sellers together, and thus engenders a viable and populated market across which a nearly unlimited variety of hedge instruments can be created and executed. But, because of a variety of heretofore insurmountable barriers, no such platform has yet emerged in the world.